Friday, October 30, 1998
Exclusive: Silicon Investor's Sheriff Lady departs
Jill McKinney, all-powerful Webmistress of Silicon
Investor's raucous bulletin boards, tells Money.com
why she is hanging up her holster
By Borzou Daragahi
moneydaily.com
For the last two years, Jill McKinney has been a
solitary soldier in the army of good taste and
Internet decorum, standing guard in a watchtower over
the millions of messages posted to the mammoth Silicon
Investor stock-discussion Web site
(http://www.techstocks.com) and booting out folks who
broke the rules.
The legendary Webmistress of the 100,000-member SI,
she has broken up ferocious online fights, ejected
shameless pitchmen, and stepped in to warn countless
users about cussing, vulgarity and ad hominem attacks.
For her efforts, she has received death threats,
marriage proposals, a dozen roses, and even
accusations of impersonating a woman. "She's a babe,"
says Chester Lee, a San Francisco chemist who met
McKinney at a party (everyone knew who Jill was) and
has since become a pal.
As Money.com caught up with the number three player at
SI, the first employee hired by co-founders Brad
and Jeff Dryer, the 27-year-old Birmingham, Ala.
native was thinking about marriage and what to do with
her cut of the $35 million in stock Seattle-based
Go2Net (Nasdaq: GNET) paid in June to buy the booming
financial discussion board.
McKinney's packing her bags. Gone are the days when
she sat home listening to Rush and Elton John in her
pajamas while answering floods of user Email and
patiently waiting for the Dryer brothers to cut her
paycheck. "It's not because they didn't have the
money," she recalls. "It's because they forgot."
McKinney will soon hand over her linguistic enforcer
badge to her assistant, Bob Zunbrunnen, whom she
recruited as a poster on her boards. And yes, fans, in
December she's going to marry that boy, Go2Net ad
salesman Nate "Lou" Munden, then move to New
York City to do public relations work for the company.
Alas, McKinney is growing up. Six years after
dropping out of South Alabama University, she's a
player at a company with a $111.6 million market
capitalization that actually is big enough to worry
about things like public relations and lawsuits.
"We've gone from three people who didn't think we were
going to be around in 3 to 6 months to a corporate
environment," McKinney says.
"When we were independent, we would just laugh at
lawsuit threats! We didn't have any money! Brad and
Jeff were sleeping on the floor. I was living in this
awful basement studio apartment and we are all wearing
the same T-shirts everyday!"
McKinney's role as moderator and conflict-resolution
specialist on the frontiers of new media has no
offline parallel, save playground monitor - in a
schoolyard where all of the kids are big and
vociferous. Even SI's policing of its threads is an
exception to the general unruliness of Internet
stock discussion boards.
SI doesn't really care what you say about a given
company, so long as you don't cuss, use vulgar terms,
spam the boards or personally harass other posters. If
you do, you may find yourself serving a two to three-
day suspension, what members jokingly call "Jill Jail"
or "Fort Bob." Do it again, and you may be exiled
permanently.
McKinney's rules allow posters to poke fun at her (or
at Bob) without fear of reprisals. "Let's all light
some incense and pray to Jill McKinney, the Goddess of
good manners on SI," one wiseguy wrote. "I find it
amusing that I have this supposed authority over all
these people," says Sheriff Jill. "They actually
threaten one another with turning each other in to
me."
While anyone can read the boards, members must pay a
$200 lifetime subscription fee if they want to speak
up. Though that requirement has kept some of the
rabble off the boards, the attacks can still get
downright personal. And if you're booted out, don't
expect a refund.
During a recent discussion about Franklin
Telecommunications (OTC: FTEL), one member who was
bullish on the stock started a brouhaha after he
likened a short-seller to Hitler. Pretty soon, a third
guy was inviting the accuser to visit the Holocaust
Memorial so he could understand how Hitler's victims
felt, thus drawing a body block himself ("It baffles
me how someone from my heritage could lower themselves
this far") even as the accused was doing the Rodney
King, appealing for peace: "It is my hope that we can
cover over what we see as the shortcomings of each
other and live in harmony."
McKinney's real accomplishment may be that she managed
to keep a wary eye on 15,000 new board messages per
day, while fielding hundreds of Emails reporting
infractions, outrages and hurt feelings. In a series
of Email and telephone interviews with Money.com, she
described SI's early days and her endless battles to
enforce the bulletin board's "Terms of Use."
Money.com: What sorts of posts will get you in trouble
at SI?
Jill McKinney: Posts that will require administrative
action generally include spamming [repetitive and
annoying Emails], vulgarity, personal attacks and
off-topic conversation. These won't get you booted
from SI unless you have received previous warnings
and/or have had a prior suspension. Getting booted right off
the bat would take something pretty serious, such as
threatening someone's life or physical safety, or
printing someone's home contact information for
purposes of harassment. I am basically dealing with the world's
largest sandbox. And the kids are stealing stuff left
and right! I just have to maintain some semblance of order.
M: What are some of the incidents that stand out in
your memory?
JM: I've had people trying to get flirty or downright
crude in Email responses, sending flowers, threatening
to wait for me at the airport when I arrived home for
Christmas. One guy sent me a plaque stating I was
officially inducted into his personal Cool Person Hall
of Fame. Someone sent me cookies.
I've been asked for pictures, what I look like, if I'm
married. I've been asked to autograph T-shirts with
messages to the user that were way over the line, with
lots of dominatrix references. All the normal things
you get from being female and online. Some of the
gifts I've received were for unbelievably small
things. I once got a dozen roses for changing some
guy's password.
M: Have you ever felt frightened?
JM: There are a couple of times when I've actually
been scared. I've felt there were some people who were
crazy enough to follow through on their threats, like
the guy who said he would be waiting for me when I
flew back to Birmingham. More often than not, it's
just creepy.
M: What's your daily work routine?
JM: My daily routine used to be sitting around in my
pajamas all day on Email when I worked at home. (Trust
me, working in your pajamas is highly recommended.)
Now I spend about 75 percent of my time in an office
in Seattle. I spend about 10 hours a day just on
Email. I don't read posts unless they are called to my
attention by another user. I definitely work dispatch,
as opposed to patrol.
M: Has SI changed since it became a paid site?
JM: The quality of the site has increased. The users
felt more accountable. The quality of the posts
improved.
M: Has it changed since you joined the suits?
JM: At the beginning, we had no income, I had no real
hours, and the bosses slept in the office. The
acquisition by Go2Net was the best thing for the SI
community. We didn't have the resources to expand the
site.
Before, we had just three people running the whole
thing. None of us could be away from the computer. It
was unrealistic that we could go on like that much
longer. Personally, it was a great decision. We have
lives again!
M: Does it feel weird being a young woman in the
guy-dominated worlds of finance and the Internet?
JM: If Jeff and Brad had not known me prior to needing
an employee, the position might very well have gone to
a man, simply because the only people with experience
up to that point were the old bulletin board users,
most of them men.
You certainly do get the sense as a woman that your
opinions and ideas are taken for granted, especially
in situations with venture capitalists and almost
anything involving funding or running a start-up
company. I always got the impression that Brad and
Jeff considered me an equal, but I almost never got
that feeling from anyone else.
M: You've taken some big risks: quitting college in
1989 to ditch your hometown and move in with a friend
in the Bay Area. What made you do it?
JM: I didn't necessarily quit school to pursue the
tech thing, but I definitely dropped out to pursue
something better. I just wasn't sure what it was until
I got to Silicon Valley. I continued my education . .
. I now have enough college credits to get a master's
degree, but not at any one college.
M: How'd you find your way to SI?
JM: I knew Brad as a friend from before he and
I moved out to the West Coast. When he told me his
brother was moving out and that the two of them were
quitting their jobs to start a website, I said what
most people with boring but comfortable jobs say to
risk takers: "Hey, you'll have to hire me when you
make it big!"
M: And you quit a fairly safe job when he did call?
JM: That was nearly three years ago. Not having a
degree or any clue about what I wanted to do, but
having taken two years of typing in high school, I
took administrative jobs that bored me to tears. Then
one day Brad said, "Jeff and I need someone to answer
Email, but we don't feel like interviewing anyone or
dealing with people we're not sure we can trust."
They were very honest about the fact that the company
could very well go under, that there was no security
and to seriously consider the risks before taking the
job. I took the job.
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